Shadow Traffic (16 page)

“How could you?” he said. “What's your point? Aren't you supposed to help people, not run away from them?”

He kept staring at the sweater, asking it questions intermittently, until some time later he saw that it was really Melanie leaning against the sofa, and not the therapist at all. He said “Melanie” or whispered it as he moved toward the sofa to embrace her. Yet when he reached it, she'd disappeared. He blinked rapidly several times, then gasped. It was a hollow, futile sound, like a muffled wind in a shed. He felt his face, then realized he could see it as if he were looking in a mirror. He gasped again, louder this time. His face was completely covered by ears squirming and multiplying like little fish. Immediately he put the gun to it and shot into the school of earfish before falling forward onto the sweater, the red of his blood merging with the sweater's pink, as if the two colors were always destined to coalesce.

It begins in the ocean with wave following wave, breaking over his head and sometimes over yours. You're on vacation again with your twelve-year-old son, Andy, on crowded Mission Beach in San Diego and he's jumping up and down in the water, laughing and squealing. You love the waves too, especially bodysurfing with them. It's a passion the two of you share (although his version of bodysurfing isn't really bodysurfing at all, something you never point out to him, of course). Andy's in the black wetsuit that you bought for him in the sporting goods store in Philadelphia, and seems oblivious to the chilly seventy-degree air. When he temporarily disappears under a wave and then emerges from it he looks like a slender little seal. In contrast, you are wearing the thickest, and one of the ugliest, T-shirts you own. The sky is a tug-of-war between sun and clouds. It gives relief one moment and removes it the next. You're shivering and want to leave but you stay because Andy wants to. Although he's improved his swimming a lot in the last year, he only weighs seventy-seven pounds, and with the strong undertow and waves you have to be extra vigilant and keep your eye on him virtually every second. Yet he also badly wants you to bodysurf (as do you), so you develop
a technique of turning around the moment your ride ends and zeroing in on him. Meanwhile, the faraway lifeguard sits in an elevated tower of sorts like a cliff atop a distant island.

There are other temptations besides the waves. There are a lot of women in bikinis or less in the water, many of whom appear to be playing a game to see whether they're revealing more of their breasts or more of their bottoms. There's a very well built brunette near you in whom the competition appears to be a tie. Since Anna left, you haven't made love with a woman, though God knows you've wanted to, which makes the mermaids of San Diego that much more difficult to disregard. Just before a new, mountainous wave arrives you do look at the brunette before telling Andy that you're taking the wave. He's rapt with attention. He makes fun of you a lot in playful ways (calls you “Face Wad,” for example), something you tolerate and actually encourage because you don't want him to be in unapproachable awe of you, as you sometimes were of your father. But in the ocean you're his water hero. You taught him how to swim and float and dive and never take foolish chances.

You hit the wave well and have a long, exquisite ride. Just before it comes, you think the brunette is looking at you and moreover realize she's the same person you've been exchanging looks with in your hotel. When your ride ends you look for her for a second but don't see her. Then you look for Andy and for a few horrifying moments don't see him either. Finally his little head pops up, and after relief suffuses you, you feel a stinging self-contempt that never completely leaves you no matter how you intermittently try to rationalize it for the rest of the day, though you do manage to keep it hidden from your highly perceptive son.

Because of your lapse in judgment in the water you stay in much longer than you intended, which greatly pleases Andy.
Eventually you stop bodysurfing, and when Andy complains about that you take his hand and invent a wave-jumping game that the two of you play. You also look away from that woman or any other that swims or boogie boards across your path.

Meanwhile your shivering is increasing. To help deal with that, you think of your father, already over sixty at the time, going out in a pouring rain and with a pretty bad cold to buy you some boxing gloves when you were seven or eight because that was your passion at the moment, and when you're that young a moment is all of time. Then you think of your mother, who sat with you while you cried because you were sick and were going to miss the first game of the seventh grade basketball season when you were set to be a starting guard. At one point, as if it were contagious, she even started crying herself. You continue to shiver but these memories help.

Finally Andy's bluish lips start to quiver and he admits that he's getting cold, so the two of you start to leave the water. Because of the fierce undertow, he lets you hold his hand until you reach the sand. Your soaked through T-shirt seems to be making you even colder. It's like wearing a bar of ice and you take it off as soon as you find your beach bag. Meanwhile, Andy claims the hotel towel—the only one you brought because it's the only clean one left.

The sky is completely gray now and the wind is strong. Still, Andy doesn't want to leave the beach. For a moment you look out at the ocean, where the woman from the hotel, who you now remember sat at the table next to you at the hotel restaurant, is just now coming in from the water. Then you focus on the expression in Andy's eyes. You think of those awful moments when you couldn't see him in the water, and when he asks you again you tell him you'll go back in the water after you both eat lunch.

Mission Beach is full of questionable-looking characters; the street that leads away from it to your hotel, even more so. You'd wanted to return today to the much more upscale and safe beach at LaJolla Shores, where even the waves are more genteel, but Andy lobbied vigorously for the more thrilling Mission Beach you could get to much faster, and you ultimately gave in. Walking back to your hotel you're almost as vigilant as you were in the ocean. The street is filled with liquor stores, head shops, and tattoo parlors. A number of shirtless, heavily tattooed men with grimly vacant expressions are smoking a variety of things while staring at the passersby. You have a fair amount of cash and your credit card in the pockets of the shorts you're carrying in one hand while holding Andy's hand with your other. You have to navigate three blocks like this. It's a lot like navigating the waves. You realize that you can't eliminate everything potentially threatening in Andy's environment, but you can't help trying. You also can't seem to stop the fantasies you have of someone hurting him physically and then your rage-filled, violent response. You do this when you walk him back from school, too, where you often imagine some bully suddenly picking on him before you come to the rescue.

You know that you are a bit overprotective of Andy but there are reasons. He's short at this point (his bone age lagging two years behind his chronological age). The doctors have assured you that eventually he'll be average height, but you can't explain all that to kids. You've been at schools your whole life and know what kids are like. Andy's also very shy with children his age. He's been raised his whole life by two single parents, as you and his mother divorced before he was born. Despite some definite
bumps in the road, his mother and you now have a good collegial relationship concerning Andy, though you realize it hasn't always been easy for him transitioning between his two homes in Philadelphia.

But to be objective about it, Andy also has a lot of things going for him. He has a strikingly beautiful, blue-eyed face, like one of the children Renoir loved to paint. He's also extremely smart, funny, very imaginative, and has an exceptional memory. It's too bad, you often think, that computers to a large degree have made memory an increasingly insignificant talent, but he will still probably be able to put it to some good use down the line. He's also loved a lot by both his parents and, because you inherited some money, is already quite well traveled and will be well provided for after you die.

You are thinking all this while waiting for your food at the Japanese restaurant, the first restaurant you saw away from the menace of Mission Street. It's funny how Andy often requests going to different restaurants when he ends up eating the same thing at all of them—French fries or plain white rice. This lunch today is obviously a white-rice occasion. Shortly after it arrives, he begins telling “the story,” his favorite thing to talk about by far. Over the years the characters and their situations have changed, but it is all part of the ongoing story—an imagined world that you two act out together.

It started when he was four or five with animal stories centered around Baby Claw, a winsome if somewhat rebellious crustacean; Tail, a rodent, who was Baby Claw's best friend; Tiny Duck, a frustrated comedian; Tony Frog, the ultimate rock star; and the psychologically challenged Happy Hedgehog. That story lasted over three years. Not only did he act out the story for at least two hours a day with you, but he also drew their daily adventures,
made meticulous maps of the town and the school they attended, and tape recorded with you fourteen school “Talent Shows,” mostly improvised songs with some stand-up comedy by Happy Hedgehog and Tiny Duck. During those years there was almost no conversation between you about what was happening in your “real lives.” (Because you had your share of career and love-life disappointments, this was sometimes a relief for you.) When you'd ask him how school was he'd say “horrible,” grow visibly distressed, and change the subject. Yet he was doing well in school academically and making some progress socially. Still, when his classmates talked to him he'd invariably look down at the ground and either say nothing or mumble an almost inaudible “hi.”

Sometimes, during breaks from the school where you taught, you'd visit him during recess to give him some Skittles (the only candy he'd eat). A few times you couldn't resist spying on him for a moment. The other kids were talking, laughing, and running with one another, but Andy was running in straight lines back and forth by himself, as if in an isolated training for some kind of grand, imaginary track meet.

Then the animal story suddenly stopped. He refused to say why. But you were encouraged that the next story was about people—albeit highly eccentric ones who lived in the mythical town of Kingsville, Ohio. One of the most memorable of these characters was Burl Lee, the town's chief thug, who ran Kingsville's nefarious amusement park, Burlyworld. Burl Lee was a sadist and Burlyworld was in his image. The only soft spots in his heart, besides Burlyworld, were for his pet lion, Burlio, and his pet bird, Vulcan Vulture, who could speak a form of English. These two Burl Lee loved unconditionally, and, accordingly, trained them to be superlative thugs in their own right.

Burl Lee & Co. lasted about two years. Again there was no explanation, but the next and current metamorphosis of the story soon followed. This time it involved an entire continent named Crasia and the characters from two rivalrous bordering countries —his homeland, Rodnesia, and yours, Rudolpha. Once more there were incredibly detailed maps not only of Rodnesia and Rudolpha but also of all the countries in the continent, from the melancholic Blubberland, whose people perpetually mourned their lost empire, to Rationalia, where reason reigned supreme.

That day while you were eating lunch in the Japanese restaurant, you two were discussing the new wave of dog shows that were getting so popular on Rodnesian TV. Often Andy's desire to tell the story or to make maps or lists about it is so strong that he ends up staying indoors regardless of your appeals about how beautiful it is outside. At such times he always had a ready argument to stay inside.

“Why do you want to go out all the time? The outdoors is so twentieth century,” he'll say. Since your body aches from the waves, you're hoping that this will be one of those times and that the two of you can go back to your warm room and lie down while you talk about the new dog shows
Fi Do Do
(pronounced “dough, dough”),
the Wonder Dog
or
Dog Thugs
and where your greatest challenge will be simply to stay awake. So after telling the story in the restaurant you ask if he'd like to go back to the hotel and continue it there and he looks stricken. “Why do you want to leave the beach?”

“I'm tired.”

“How can you be tired so quickly?”

“I'm a lot older than you.”

“But, Face Wad, you're the most outdoors person I know, and you promised.”

“OK, don't get upset. We'll go back to the beach in a few minutes.”

“Is that a promise, you wad?”

“Yes,” you say quickly, and that settles that.